Christ giving his Blood

The painting was commissioned from Lorenzo Lotto by Federico Priuli, a prominent Venetian patrician, during the artist's stay in Treviso in 1543. It is an oil on canvas dated to approximately 1540–1545. The work came into being during one of the most difficult periods of Lotto's life, when he was aging, unsettled, and poorly received in Venice, where Titian's dominance overshadowed other artists.

Priuli was dissatisfied with the result, describing it as a "quadretto piccolo" showing the Saviour shedding his blood in the sacrament surrounded by many little angels. Because of this reaction, Lotto was subsequently required to return to Priuli an additional small painting on panel, "un'altra tavoletta simile a quella ch'el me havea data a dipinzere." The painting is now held in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

The painting is held in Vienna at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, inventoried as GG_138.

It was commissioned from Lotto by the Venetian patrician Federico Priuli in Treviso in 1543 and delivered after minor adjustments prompted by the patron’s dissatisfaction with the first version.

The work has been exhibited periodically within the museum’s holdings; it was also shown in the 1955 exhibition “Lorenzo Lotto” in Venice and in the 1999–2000 exhibition “Lorenzo Lotto: Rediscovered Master of the Renaissance” in Bergamo and Madrid.

The critical reception of Lorenzo Lotto’s Christ giving his Blood (c. 1540–45) has long centered on its theological and stylistic ambiguities. Scholars such as Francesca Cortesi Bosco argue the work reaffirms orthodox doctrine, aligning with Lotto’s later religious commissions like the Polyptych of Ponteranica. Others, including Bernard Berenson, interpret the lower figure, a nude woman with a mirror, as an unsettling symbol of human sin or heresy, reflecting the era’s religious tensions.

The painting was commissioned by Federico Priuli, a Venetian patrician with suspected heterodox ties, during Lotto’s difficult late period in Treviso, when the artist faced marginalization in Venice under Titian’s dominance.

Its iconography, Christ in glory amid cherubs, blood spilling into a chalice, and Passion symbols, has been read as both a defense of Catholic Eucharistic doctrine and, controversially, as subtly sympathetic to Reformist critiques. The unresolved debates around the mirror-bearing figure underscore the work’s contested place in art history, situated between Counter-Reformation orthodoxy and the lingering shadows of Protestant challenges.

Lorenzo Lotto’s Christ Giving His Blood is an oil painting executed in 1540. The work belongs to the later phase of the Venetian school and reflects the transitional Mannerist style that followed the High Renaissance. It is part of the permanent collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna and exemplifies Lotto’s focus on devotional subjects for ecclesiastical commissions.